Second dam may bolster Bear Creek

Posted: Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Northeast Georgia officials are considering buying a Middle Oconee River dam to serve as a backup to Bear Creek Reservoir.

Generating power at the small Tallassee Shoals dam in Jackson County no longer is profitable due to low river levels, so Lawrenceville-based Fall Line Hydro Co. is looking to sell it, project manager Robert Davis said. "We want to give the (Upper Oconee Basin) Water Authority a chance to look at it first, given the water shortages, the drought situation and so forth," he said.

The basin authority is a partnership among Athens-Clarke, Barrow, Jackson and Oconee counties that built and manages Bear Creek Reservoir.

Fall Line Hydro's pond, located on 35 acres of privately owned land, can hold about 114 million gallons of water, Davis said. Bear Creek Reservoir draws water from the Middle Oconee River through Fall Line's pond, and water held by the dam also could be released downstream and picked up by the Athens-Clarke Public Utilities Department, Davis said.

The basin authority's engineering and finance committees met with Davis on Monday and talked about the offer in a closed session. No decision was made, Athens-Clarke Deputy Manager Bob Snipes said.

"We still are evaluating it and discussing it," Snipes said.

The authority's engineering committee will meet next month and may make a recommendation to the full authority, he said.

The basin authority also considered buying the dam in 2002, Snipes said.

Fall Line's asking price for the dam, surrounding property, equipment and permit to draw water from the pond behind the dam is $1.25 million, Davis said. If the basin authority continued to use the dam to generate electricity, that revenue could pay for the purchase, operating and maintenance costs over 25 to 50 years, he said.

Oglethorpe Power Corp. built the dam in the mid-1980s as a training project for a much larger dam near Rome and sold it to Fall Line in 2003, Davis said. It generates an average of 800 to 1,000 kilowatts of electricity, which is sold to 10 electric membership corporations, including Walton and Jackson EMCs, he said.

Basin authority members held preliminary discussions in recent months on working together to build a second regional reservoir in the wake of the ongoing drought. The engineering firm Jordan, Jones & Goulding is updating a population study to estimate how many people will live in the area in the coming decades and how much water they will need.

Climatologists are predicting a warm and dry winter and another dry summer, and expect the drought to continue at least through next fall.

Athens received just 2.6 inches of rain in January, more than two inches below average, and the North and Middle Oconee rivers are only 4.6 and 1.37 feet deep, according to the National Weather Service.